Bruce Langford's
Mindfulness Mode Podcast

299 Have Compassion For Yourself Explains Tanja Diamond

February 25, 2018 by Bruce Langford

Tanja Diamond is a Tantra Master and Coach extraordinaire. She’s the creator of the High Speed Evolution Coaching Program. Tanja and her coaching team are dedicated to getting people unstuck in life, love, and money. Tanja is also known for her expertise inthe area of Tantra, sex, teens, and parenting and has garnered over 18,000 hours of coaching and consulting time over the past 30 years. Tanja has been called the “Coaches' coach”.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

Wow, do I have a bullying story for you. At 10 years old, I was living in Africa and all of a sudden I came down with this weird patch on my elbow.

And so the first thought everybody had was leprosy. So you know, my parents were freaked out. Leprosy is a really nasty thing. It's not a good thing at all.

And it ends up I had psoriasis. What happened was it ended up taking over about eighty percent of my body. And so kids used to always make bets like I'll give you a buck if you touch her.

I would sit at a desk and this one girl used to disinfect her desk when I was done, even though the teacher had said it's not contagious.

And so it was totally ugly. I mean, I'm big just gnarly. It looked like I was burned and it was really bad. It was bad in the beginning. And so I got bullied about that. I was also two years younger. I was twelve when I went into ninth grade and so I was younger and smaller.

These girls set me up, actually the cool people set me up for a bad, bad fall. They put little notes in my locker, like it was from a secret admirer. And so I'm reading these notes and I think this boy likes me, you know, I'm kind of like, oh my gosh, you know.

And it escalates over the next couple of weeks to. It's like, oh yeah, meet me in the Commons area. Right.

And at first I was thinking this can't be true. Like I'm Geeky, kind of like, you know, like hideous looking, you know, when my sweet tender heart shows up there in the commons and I'm sitting there waiting and you know, I'm sure I was bright red. I'm shuffling my feet, I'm super nervous.

And then all of a sudden this whole group of people start laughing.

And I'm standing there and they're like saying like, really? You thought somebody could like you? So that was it, but I've been bullied by parents because of my psoriasis.

I was like, at a swimming pool. This one woman was like, you need to get out of the pool, you can't swim here. And I said, this is not contagious with psoriasis. And she's like, you know, you need to get out.

She started escalating, making her voice really loud. So I've had that happen over the years and I would say that my way through it was actually I kind of fell into a kind of a mindfulness mode.

I decided one day that this was somebody else's problem, like I wasn't going to allow somebody else's opinion or feeling or whatever influence what I was. Because all I wore was long sleeves and you know, like I hid all the time. I chucked them all.

Then I wore shorts, put on a tank top and said, so be it. I kind of walked out into the sun and it's like, I'll just deal with it, right.